I'm in the process of moving data over from my Windows 2000 server to a new SuSE 9.1 box running Samba 3.05. From a workstation, I've mapped two drives to identical directories on both the Windows and Samba servers.

Using a commandline performance app called Readfile - http://www.winimage.com/readfile.htm ,I've been running a batch file to test the read performance between the two boxes. When reading a directory with a few thousand 1MB files, the Samba box is just slightly faster - around 10%. But with a directory containing a dozen 1GB files, the Samba server outperforms the Windows box by almost 100% ! Nice !